2016 Academy Awards – Bitch Flicks

#OscarsSoWhite: The Fight for Representation at the Academy Awards

But beyond academy membership, changes need to be implemented on every level, from writing to directing to acting. Speaking in a roundtable on Oscar Diversity, Lara Brown notes that in order to diversify the entertainment industry, women ought be present in a variety of roles. Brown, who directs the Political Management Program at George Washington University believes that women ought to be present in every aspect of the filmmaking process.

This guest post is written by Danika Kimball.

In recent years, moviegoers, critics, and activists have been increasingly outspoken about Hollywood’s apparent diversity problem. Most recently, the battle over identity and inclusion came to a head with the January unveiling of Oscar nominees, where for the second year in a row, all 20 of the acting nominees were revealed to be white — a point which was not glossed over at the 88th Academy Awards.

During last year’s academy awards, April Reign, an attorney who manages BroadwayBlack.com, began using the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in an attempt to express her frustration at the state of diversity in Hollywood. The hashtag has since gone viral and catalyzed a vital conversation. Reign explained to the Los Angeles Times:

“It happened because I was disappointed once again in the lack of diversity and inclusion with respect to the nominees. … And we see, despite all of the talk since last year, nothing has changed and it looks even worse this year.”

The lack of diversity and inclusion at this year’s academy awards was not glossed over, as Chris Rock opened the program with an biting monologue highlighting the academy’s representation issues — renaming the Oscars the “White People’s Choice Awards.”

“If they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job,” he added later, “Y’all would be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”

The Academy Awards are just the most recent of many instances that show if you’re looking for an accurate depiction of ethnic and gender diversity in the American workforce, Hollywood is the last place you should be looking.

Recent studies by USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative recently released a brand new study, which offers an unflattering overview revealing the true extent of the ways in which Hollywood is failing diversity practices. Dr. Stacy Smith, who led the team responsible for these findings, said in a recent interview, “The prequel to OscarsSoWhite is HollywoodSoWhite. … We don’t have a diversity problem. We have an inclusion crisis.”

Their report evaluated every speaking character across 414 films, television, and digital stories released in 2014-2015, covering 11,000 speaking characters who were then analyzed on the basis of gender, racial/ethnic representation, and LGBT status. Researchers also analyzed 10,000 directors, writers, and show creators on the basis of gender and race, and 1,500 executives at different media companies.

Their analysis? “The film industry still functions as a straight, white, boy’s club.”

Other studies performed this year have had similar findings. As reported by NPR, a 2015 UCLA study of Diversity in Hollywood confirms the gender and racial imbalances in film and television, behind the scenes and in front of the camera, which compares minority representation to their proportion of the population.

Darnell Hunt, who co-authored the UCLA study, notes that at every level in Hollywood, women and people of color are underrepresented, although people of color have made slight gains in employment arenas since the last time the study was performed.

Despite the fact that ethnic minorities “make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population,” they are represented in leading Hollywood roles a mere 17 percent of the time. And as far as Hollywood executives are concerned, the UCLA study notes that “the corps of CEOS and/or chairs running the 18 studios examined was 94 percent white and 100 percent male.” The study also notes that behind the scenes, directing and writing positions still remain largely white and largely male.

Ana-Christina Ramón, who co-authored the findings notes that the findings are not surprising by any means, but the statistics carry an important message to studios about the profitability of diversity. She tells NPR:

“We continue to see that diversity sells. … And that’s a big point that needs to be then relayed to the studios and the networks.”

She’s not wrong, as her studies prove, films with diverse casts enjoy huge profit margins in the box office, the same for which can be said with television. But it seems as though, despite these statistics, gatekeepers in the entertainment industry (who are white men by and large) believe that the best way to keep their jobs is to surround themselves with people who look like them.

The study also notes that diversity has won out in television, as shows like How To Get Away With Murder, Grey’s Anatomy, Empire, Fresh Off the Boat, and Master of None have proven to draw in high amounts of viewers. The reason? Author Darnell Hunt argues that the answer to that question lies in the general amount of risk associated with each genre.

Television shows are produced in relatively high numbers each year, and budgets operate on a fairly small scale, but for studios produce relatively few films each year and budgets for those can cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars — making it imperative to higher ups that these films are successful.

Social media has also changed the landscape of television, as viewers now have social capital to effect change. Ramón tells NPR, “Every viewer has really the power to influence the network directly, especially through Twitter.” To show the power of social media in television, she sites the ABC show Scandal, where viewer opinion changed the arc for a show which was on it’s way to being canceled.

Scandal’s success has prompted even more diverse programming to appear on television, with another Shondaland series How to Get Away With Murder making its television debut just two years later. Television executives are beginning to recognize that shows with a Black female lead are profitable.

For television and film alike, the statistics are sobering, and change ought to be enacted quickly in order to bridge the gross lack of diversity present in all forms of entertainment media. But it looks as though change is in the making. Following this due criticism, it appears as though the academy is increasing measures to diversify their membership. Earlier this year, the academy’s board of governors unanimously voted to double the number of women and people of color in its roster by 2020.

“I think the way [diversity increases] is to have more women in those behind-the scenes in writing, directing, and studio executive roles, because you have to make women more integral to the story, not just the side arm candy to the man’s story.”

In February, the New York Times published, “What It’s Really Like to Work in Hollywood (*If You’re Not A Straight White Man),” which featured interviews with 27 women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in the entertainment industry, highlighting their “personal experiences of not being seen, heard, or accepted.”

Actress, director, and producer Eva Longoria shared:

“I didn’t speak Spanish [growing up]. I’m ninth generation. I mean, I’m as American as apple pie. I’m very proud of my heritage. But I remember moving to L.A. and auditioning and not being Latin enough for certain roles. Some white male casting director was dictating what it meant to be Latin. He decided I needed an accent. He decided I should [have] darker-colored skin. The gatekeepers are not usually people of color, so they don’t understand you should be looking for way more colors of the rainbow within that one ethnicity.”

Wendell Pierce added his experience while in the casting office of a major studio:

“The head of casting said, ‘I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have black people then.’ He literally said that. I told that casting director: ‘You ever heard of Othello? Shakespeare couldn’t just make up black people. He saw them.’”

In a similar fashion, Emmy winner Viola Davis mentioned the importance of creating unique roles for women and people of color, as expressed in her acceptance speech earlier this year:

“The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. … I always say that Meryl Streep would not be Meryl Streep without Sophie’s Choice, without Kramer vs. Kramer, without Devil Wears Prada. You can’t be Meryl Streep if you’re the third girl from the left in the narrative with two scenes.”

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

Attachment Mothering in ‘Room’

While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, ‘Room’ can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque…fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of rape, and sexual assault]

I remember a friend telling me that she fantasized about being in prison for a year as it was the only way she would have time to complete all her projects uninterrupted.

This anecdote immediately came to mind at a panel discussion after a screening of Room. The female audience member who asked the question recalled a book club talking point scribbled in the back of her copy of the 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue wondering if the author (who also adapted her book for the screen, and was nominated for an Oscar) idealizes the solitude of imprisonment. While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, Room can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque — later parts of the book, particularly Ma’s post-escape prime-time interview, politicize things like breastfeeding, the prison industrial complex and abortion — fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

When I reached out to panel member and Melbourne Writers Festival program manager Jo Case to expand further on her thoughts about Room, she said that the story “explores that mythical ideal of motherhood: all-encompassing, fully present, hyper-attentive. Completely child-focused. It’s our culture’s impossible (and usually untenable) ideal.”

Further to this, I found Room to be a pretty obvious metaphor for attachment parenting. Jack is still being breastfed at age five — though with a lax diet born out of captivity, breastfeeding makes sense. Ma is always there with Jack, relentlessly threading eggshells onto Egg Snake, fashioning Labyrinth out of toilet rolls, and encouraging Jack to use his imagination because what else is there to do in a 10 x 10 soundproofed shed. Attachment parenting can induce in parents the loss of their sense of self if and when the child goes off to school — or in Room’s case, Outside — and makes a life for themselves independent of the close knit parent/child union. Despite Ma’s relish at re-entering the world and thus, finding a semblance of her former self separate from Jack, their intense bond noticeably loosens the moment they arrive at the clinic (more so in the book than the film). Jack is then the one to look back at Room through rose-colored glasses and in the way the story is told post-escape, with the added impetus of being from Jack’s perspective, who can blame him: “Ma was always in Room” while he is often left to fend for himself “in the world” while Ma tries to make sense of her resentment (“Do you know what happened [to my high school friends]? Nothing. Nothing happened to them.”), depression and PTSD.

All we have to do is look at Jack’s heightened intelligence and his being placed on a pedestal in “saving” Ma to understand that he could be viewed as the ultimate fantasy for all those parents (all parents?) who claim their child is “special,” “gifted,” and “advanced for their age.” You know the ones.

I certainly do: my day job is at a cultural institution where I often hear from parents who insist that their children experience things aimed at kids twice their age and, in some cases, even at adults. Jack is familiar with stories well above his age level, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, told to him by Ma. His memory is impeccable and his literacy skills are strengthened by rereading the few books permitted in Room by Ma’s tormenter, Old Nick, and playing “Parrot,” a game that consists of repeating what Jack hears on talk shows and soap operas. In a society that often foists iPads and smartphones into its children’s hands, Jack’s upbringing is romanticized, especially in the early stages of the story when he is blissfully unaware that anything exists outside of Room and the make-believe world of TV (though Jack is permitted half an hour or so of screen-time, Ma is reluctant to grant more as “TV turns your brain to mush”) is real.

Donoghue is quick to deny this, though, telling Katherine Wyrick of BookPage:

“Nobody wants to idealize imprisonment, but many of us have such complicated lives, and we try to fit parenting in alongside work and socializing… We try and have so many lives at once, and we run ourselves ragged.

“Today parenting is so self-conscious and worried, so I wanted to ask the question, how minimally could you do it? … [Ma] really civilizes and humanizes Jack. … She passes along her cultural knowledge to him, from religion to tooth-brushing to rules.”

Room may be a very successful literary and filmic thought experiment for Donoghue. But it’s also a fantasy in which one of the biggest luxuries for parents — time — reigns supreme. In a recent parenting column on Jezebel, Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes:

“Time is one of the most valuable commodities in post-industrial capitalism. It’s valuable because it’s scarce; we run around acting so busy all the time, partly because our jobs are squeezing us for it, and partly because there are so many competing entities constantly vying for our time and attention. […]

“Spending the first 10 months at home with each of my kids was enormously empowering. By the time I returned to work, I was ready for the company of adults again; work even seemed easy compared to caring for a nonverbal person all day. The time we’d spent together absolved me of a lot of the guilt that many people feel when they first put their kids in the care of others. It also gave me the privilege of feeling confident — even a little cavalier! — about my parenting choices.”

Donoghue discusses similar ideas in an interview for The Independent upon the release of the book:

“It may sound outrageous, but every parent I know has had moments of feeling as if they’ve been locked in a room with their toddler for years on end. Even 20 minutes of building towers of blocks can feel like a lifetime. I’m not saying that Ma’s experience is every mother’s experience, not at all. … But there’s a psychological core that’s the same: the child needs you so much that you don’t fully own yourself anymore.”

Utilizing time for things other than child-rearing is often deemed the height of selfishness, for parents and the child-free alike. With Ma’s characterization comes a certain selfishness (or self-preservation) voiced by the post-escape prime-time interviewer who asks Ma whether she ever considered relinquishing Jack to Old Nick to drop off at a hospital in the hopes of giving him a better — freer — life. While I can see where the interviewer is coming from — and maybe in a perfect world, sure, Jack would have grown up under different circumstances — but he’s a five-year-old who challenges his mother’s assertion that there are two sides to everything (“Not an octagon. An octagon has eight sides.”) and can spell feces, for crying out loud! How many “gifted” children of a similar age but very different circumstances can we say the same of?

Ma may conceive of the great escape in order to get Jack out of Room but, as the Nova panel discussed, she’s also hoping he’ll be savvy enough to lead his rescuers back to her. Again, putting so much faith in a five-year-old could be considered delusional, but that speaks to the trauma of an abductee who’s been raped almost every day for the past seven years; a trauma that I couldn’t even begin to imagine and is for another article.

Conversely, when I watched Room for the third time with my own mother, she found Ma’s “gone days,” her forcefulness in preparing Jack to escape Room, and her depression and disengagement from her son upon release to “not be how a mother should act.” Brie Larson’s Ma is far more assertive and fleshed out in the film, whereas on the page she’s ineffectual, agreeing with Jack when he calls her “dumbo” when things don’t go to plan. As an intimate partner violence survivor herself, I was expecting from Mum more empathy towards Ma. But that’s the beauty and curse of storytelling, particularly in a narrative as controversial and emotional as Room — everyone responds to it differently.

I think Room can best be summed up by Case’s description:

“It’s a horror story not just because of the awful circumstances of [Ma’s] imprisonment — rape and kidnapping — but because it dramatizes one of the hardest aspects of motherhood: feeling trapped by routine and the demands of everyday parenting [and] feeling separated from the outside world in your own mother-child universe.”

In the case of Room, though, “this kind of motherhood saves the mother from her prison rather than trapping her in a domestic [one].”

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

One Immigrant’s Thoughts on ‘Brooklyn’ and Western Privilege

From the thousands of immigrant stories that could have been told, that Hollywood chose a heterosexual love story between two white Westerners in the 1950s is telling — that critics and audiences have lauded and lavished it with praise is even more so.

This guest post is written by Fernanda Cunha. | Spoilers ahead.

I watched Brooklyn in the same week my Facebook newsfeed flooded with reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. In December, I had both heard and read of the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to raid and deport Central American families, at the same time, the John Crowley-directed film Brooklyn continued playing to rave reviews. As a first generation immigrant whose main self-identifier is native of Brazil / immigrant / foreigner, I deliberately and adamantly seek stories about the immigrant and diasporic experience, and I’m excited when they manage to permeate mainstream culture and media. In some ways, this was also true for Brooklyn — though my excitement was not the same as discovering Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah or Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans, both contemporary novels about different immigrant experiences — as I looked forward to watching a young woman’s migrant journey. In retrospect, having now seen the film, I am not entirely sure how I ever thought I would relate to the film’s premise. In its desperate attempt to tell a universal story (which is unsurprisingly white and Western), the film only ends up feeling false, and ultimately falls short.

Released to select theaters in November 2015, the recently Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn (based on the novel by Colm Tóibín) stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis Lacey, who migrates from Ireland to Brooklyn in the 1950s, the story begins with a hesitant, and nervous Eilis preparing for, and somewhat dreading, her journey to the United States, and ends with her triumphant Brooklyn “homecoming,” after returning to her original hometown of Enniscorthy and feeling trapped by her surroundings and her sister’s sudden death.

Visually, the film delivers — the cinematography looks pretty, and the production and costume design both succeed in building a believable 1950s visual story. It’s in Ronan, however, that the film finds its backbone. Her performance makes what could potentially be unrealistic and false scenes feel sincere and raw. The film’s idealistically brief moments of homesickness and grieving become the most touching scenes of the film through Ronan’s physical translation of a weak and lacking screenplay. And lacking it is. Eilis’s experiences as an immigrant take a backseat in her newfound love for an Italian-American man, and the immigrant’s story I was so looking forward to is lost in the film’s attempt at Western appeal and universality. From the thousands of immigrant stories that could have been told, that Hollywood chose a heterosexual love story between two white Westerners in the 1950s is telling — that critics and audiences have lauded and lavished it with praise is even more so.

Besides Eilis’s laughably brief moment of homesickness and her inability to be home for her sister’s burial, none of her experiences as an immigrant felt familiar to me. She does not get made fun of for her accent — she does not even have to struggle with learning English, and in turn does not have to spend most of the next two years in the United States in silence, embarrassed of the ways her tongue cannot seem to master the language. She relates to Americans easily, and there are no mentions of deportation. Despite a small disappointment at not seeing myself reflected on screen, I am okay with this unfamiliarity. I am sure hers looks like another immigrant’s story, and I understand that the immigrant experience is not monolithic and manifests differently for every individual.

I struggle, however, with Hollywood’s choice to tell and so openly embrace this kind of immigrant’s story while the United States continues to deport Central American immigrants to mostly widespread silence. I worry about the continued invisibility of native Latin American peoples in the United States, especially undocumented ones, when their dehumanization persists through a proliferation of Latin American xenophobia and hate speeches of public figures like Donald Trump. Representation is meaningful and powerful, and the lack thereof is just as salient. I wonder what it means for others to not see these representations, to be so sheltered to stories of undocumented immigrants that society perceives their actions and existence as inherently and automatically criminal.

In today’s social and pop culture climate, it’s not difficult to wonder how differently critics and audiences would receive a film like this if told from a Latin American woman’s perspective. It probably would have never been made. In the miraculous chance that it had, I wonder if audiences would have viewed Eilis’s decision of accepting an opportunity in the United States as stealing, taking something that was not hers. I doubt Eilis’s actions of marrying an American before returning to her home country where she rekindles a friendship with another man and flirts with the idea of staying would have been well received. Audiences would have no sympathy for a woman like that. I can imagine the kinds of names she would have been called, and the implications others would discern in her actions.

In some ways, I am glad this story doesn’t exist, not only because I found the film uninteresting and lazy, but because it would be a disservice to the kinds of stories I experienced and heard as an immigrant. Still, the disappointingly simplistic story Brooklyn tells beats the reality of not having our stories told at all. I would rather see a simple and two-dimensional love story between a Latina immigrant and an American man than watch another movie set in Latin America in which crimes and violence dominate, and all perpetuated by the Latin@ characters. Stories in which the American characters suffer tremendously in a ruthless foreign land — the creative voices behind those films receive praise endlessly for their bravery, and the Latin@ voices continue to be ignored and silenced.

Fernanda Cunha is a native of Brazil living in the U.S., a writer, and a student of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her writing focuses on the humanization of immigrants, often done through a feminist lens. Her writing has been featured in The Feminist Wire.